KDE 2.1 is officially out! This is a solid release with major improvements to Konqueror and KMail, the addition of the excellent IDE KDevelop, as well as the modular new multimedia player noatun. It has a whole slew of improvements over 2.0; you can find the change log here. The full press release is attached. Enjoy -- I already installed it and it rules!

DATELINE FEBRUARY 26, 2001

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New KDE Desktop Ready for the Enterprise

KDE Ships Leading Desktop with Advanced Web Browser for Linux
and Other UNIXes

February 26, 2001 (The INTERNET).
The KDE
Project today announced the release of KDE 2.1,
a powerful and easy-to-use Internet-enabled desktop for Linux. KDE
features Konqueror, a
state-of-the-art web browser, as an integrated
component of its user-friendly desktop environment, as well asKDevelop,
an advanced IDE, as a central component of KDE's powerful
development environment.
This release marks a leap forward in Linux desktop stability, usability
and maturity and is suitable for enterprise deployment.
The KDE Project strongly encourages all users to upgrade to KDE 2.1.

KDE and all its components are available for free under
Open Source licenses from the KDEserver
and its mirrors and can
also be obtained on CD-ROM.
KDE 2.1 is available in33 languages and
ships with the core KDE
libraries, the core desktop environment (including Konqueror), developer
packages (including KDevelop), as well
as the over 100 applications from the other
standard base KDE packages (administration, games,
graphics, multimedia, network, PIM and utilities).

"This second major release of the KDE 2 series is a real improvement in
terms of stability, performance
and features," said David Faure, release manager for KDE 2.1 and
KDE Representative atMandrakesoft.
"KDE 2 has
now matured into a solid, intuitive and complete desktop for daily use.
Konqueror is a full-featured and robust web browser
and important applications like the mail client (KMail) have greatly
improved.
The multimedia architecture has made great strides and
this release inaugurates the new media player noatun,
which has a modular, plugin design for playing the latest audio and
video formats.
For development, KDE 2.1 for the first time is bundled
with KDevelop, an outstanding IDE/RAD which will be comfortably familiar to
developers with Windows development backgrounds.
In short, KDE 2.1
is a state-of-the-art desktop and development environment,
and positions Linux/Unix to make significant inroads in the home and
enterprise."

"KDE 2.1 opens the door to widespread adoption of the Linux desktop
and will help provide the success on the desktop that Linux already
enjoys in the server space," added Dirk Hohndel, CTO ofSuse AG.
"With its intuitive
interface, code maturity and excellent development tools and environment, I am
confident that enterprises and third party developers will realize
the enormous potential KDE offers and will migrate their workstations
and applications to Linux/KDE."

In addition, KDE offers seamless network transparency for accessing
or browsing files on Linux, NFS shares, MS Windows
SMB shares, HTTP pages, FTP directories, LDAP directories and audio CDs.
The modular,
plug-in nature of KDE's file architecture makes it simple to add additional
protocols (such as IPX, WebDAV or digital cameras) to KDE, which would
then automatically be available to all KDE applications.

KDE's configurability and customizability
touches every aspect of the desktop.
KDE offers a unique cascading
customization feature where customization settings are inherited through
different layers, from global to per-user, permitting enterprise-wide
and group-based configurations.
KDE's sophisticated theme support
starts with Qt's style engine, which permits developers and artists to
create their own widget designs.
KDE 2.1 ships with over 14 of these styles,
some of which emulate the look of various operating systems.
Additionally
KDE includes a new theme manager and does an excellent job of
importing themes from GTK and GNOME.
Moreover, KDE 2 fully
supports Unicode and KHTML is the only free HTML rendering engine on
Linux/X11 that features nascent support for BiDi scripts
such as Arabic and Hebrew.

KDE 2 features an advanced, network-transparent multimedia architecture
based on aRts, the Analog Realtime Synthesizer.
ARts is a full-featured sound system which
includes a number of effects and filters, a modular analog synthesizer
and a mixer.
The aRts sound server provides network transparent sound support for
both input and output using MCOP, a CORBA-like network design, enabling
applications running on remote computers to output sound and receive
input from the local workstation.
This architecture provides a much-needed complement
to the network transparency provided by X and for the first time permits
users to run their applications remotely with sound enabled.
Moreover, aRts enables multiple applications (local or remote) to
output sound and/or video concurrently.
Video support is available for MPEG versions
1, 2 and 4 (experimental), as well as the AVI and DivX formats.
Using the aRts component technology, it is very easy to develop
multimedia applications.

KDevelop is a leading Linux IDE
with numerous features for rapid application
development, including a GUI dialog builder, integrated debugging, project
management, documentation and translation facilities, built-in concurrent
development support, and much more.

KParts, KDE 2's proven component object model, handles
all aspects of application embedding, such as positioning toolbars and insertingthe proper menus when the embedded component is activated or deactivated.
KParts can also interface with the KIO trader to locate available handlers for
specific mimetypes or services/protocols.
This technology is used extensively by theKOffice suite and Konqueror.

KIO implements application I/O in a separate
process to enable a
non-blocking GUI without the use of threads.
The class is network and protocol transparent
and hence can be used seamlessly to access HTTP, FTP, POP, IMAP,
NFS, SMB, LDAP and local files.
Moreover, its modular
and extensible design permits developers to "drop in" additional protocols,
such as WebDAV, which will then automatically be available to all KDE
applications.
KIO also implements a trader which can locate handlers
for specified mimetypes; these handlers can then be embedded within
the requesting application using the KParts technology.

The XML GUI employs XML to create and position
menus, toolbars and possibly
other aspects of the GUI.
This technology offers developers and users
the advantage of simplified configurability of these user interface elements
across applications and automatic compliance with theKDE Standards
and Style Guide irrespective of modifications to the standards.

DCOP is a client-to-client communications
protocol intermediated by a
server over the standard X11 ICE library.
The protocol supports both
message passing and remote procedure calls using an XML-RPC to DCOP "gateway".
Bindings for C, C++ and Python, as well as experimental Java bindings, are
available.

KHTML is an HTML 4.0 compliant rendering
and drawing engine.
The class
will support the full gamut of current Internet technologies, including
JavaScript, Java, HTML 4.0, CSS-2
(Cascading Style Sheets), SSL (Secure Socket Layer for secure communications)
and Netscape Communicator plugins (for
viewing Flash,
RealAudio, RealVideo and similar technologies).
The KHTML class can easily
be used by an application as either a widget (using normal window
parenting) or as a component (using the KParts technology).
KHTML, in turn, has the capacity to embed components within itself
using the KParts technology.

Some distributors choose to provide binary packages of KDE for certain
versions of their distribution.
Some of these binary packages for KDE 2.1
will be available for free download underhttp://ftp.kde.org/stable/2.1/distribution/
or under the equivalent directory at one of the many KDE ftp servermirrors.
Please note that the
KDE team is not responsible for these packages as they are provided by third
parties -- typically, but not always, the distributor of the relevant
distribution.

KDE 2.1 requires qt-2.2.4, the free version of which is available
from the above locations usually under the name qt-x11-2.2.4.
KDE 2.1
should work with Qt-2.2.3 but Qt-2.2.4 is recommended.

"We welcome the release of KDE 2.1," stated Dr. Markus Draeger, Senior Manager for Partner Relations at Fujitsu Siemens Computers. "The release introduces several important new components, like KDevelop and the media player noatun, and overall is a major step forward for this leading GUI on Linux."

"We are very excited about the enhancements in KDE 2.1 and we are pleased
to be able to contribute to the project," said Rene Schmidt, Corel's
Executive Vice-President, Linux Products. "KDE continues to improve with
each release, and these enhancements will make our easy-to-use Linux
distribution for the desktop even better."

"A greater number and availability of Linux applications is an important
factor that will determine if Linux permeates the enterprise desktop,"
said Drew Spencer, Chief Technology Officer for Caldera Systems, Inc.
"KDE 2.1 addresses this issue with the integration of the Konqueror
browser and KDevelop, a tool that allows developers to create
applications in C++ for all kinds of environments. Together with the
existing tools available for KDE, KDevelop is a one-stop solution for
developers."

"With the 2.1 release, KDE again demonstrates its capacity to offer rich
software and provide a complete and stable environment for everyday use",
added Gaël Duval, co-founder of Mandrakesoft. "This latest release
has paved the way for KDE on user's desktops in the enterprise as well
as at home. From the full-featured web browser to the friendly
configuration center, it provides all the common facilities many
computers users need to abandon Windows entirely."

About KDE

KDE is an independent, collaborative project by hundreds of developers
worldwide to create a sophisticated, customizable and stable desktop environmentemploying a component-based, network-transparent architecture.
KDE is working proof of the power of the Open Source "Bazaar-style" software
development model to create first-rate technologies on par with
and superior to even the most complex commercial software.

Trademarks Notices.
KDE and K Desktop Environment are trademarks of KDE e.V.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
Unix is a registered trademark of The Open Group.
Trolltech and Qt are trademarks of Trolltech AS.
MS Windows, Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer are trademarks or registered
trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.
Netscape and Netscape Communicator are trademarks or registered trademarks of Netscape Communications Corporation in the United States and other countries and JavaScript is a trademark of Netscape Communications Corporation.
Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Flash is a trademark or registered trademark of Macromedia, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.
RealAudio and RealVideo are trademarks or registered trademarks of RealNetworks, Inc.
All other trademarks and copyrights referred to in this announcement are the property of their respective owners.

[Note: Posting and Thread Thresholds for this article were broken since the early morning of 27 Feb 2001 till the afternoon of the same day, due to a new caching strategy. Our apologies for the inconvenience.]

Comments

Of course, kudos to the developers, artists, beta testers and everyone else who contributed! Fortunately I am installing Linux for a friend tomorrow so I can actually celebrate the release, it's not a real milestone for CVS users. ;-)

Then clearly the good people at KDE need to pull the link from this page. They were notified the day of the release that the link was no good (and neither are the links for *most* of the packages) and still they do nothing.

Oh, but KDE is still using QT. And its open source now. So thats good news.

Then clearly the good people at KDE need to pull the link from this page. They were notified the day of the release that the link was no good (and neither are the links for *most* of the packages) and still they do nothing.

Oh, but KDE is still using QT. And its open source now. So thats good news.

No need to do that. Just add:
deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US main contrib non-free
deb-src http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US main contrib non-free to your /etc/apt/sources.list and apt-get update. You should then be able to apt-get install kdebase and the deps taken care of in the usual way. Alternativley, use dselect, update, and then you can select the parts of KDE2 you want from the menu, again with the deps taken care of.
The reason there are two sources listed above is because most sources I tried don,t carry the crypto and ssl libs for it for some strange reason. There may be mirrors nearer to you, but these worked for me.
Hope this helps any fellow debian users.

I can no longer speak for Mandrake as I am no longer working for the company,
but here is my guess: There was probably a slight confusion over who is
responsible for making the new RPM's. I had been creating all RPM's for the
7.2 KDE updates until about 2 weeks ago. It takes time to reassign
responsibilities. I have had some email with people who know what is going on
and they are working on building rpm's for kde 2.1. You have not been
forgotten about.

Absolutely awesome! I have constantly heard idiots on ZDNet, CNET, etc, claim that although Linux is great on the server, it'll never be as good on the desktop as linux! All we need now is a better KOffice, and a merge or compat with GNOME (no easy task, but I'm positive that the hard working KDE developers can accomplish it) and within 5 years, M$ will be making nothing but mice! Summary : KICKIN! Also, kudos the the awesome developers at Enlightenment, GNOME, WM, and all other OSS projects! The future of computing rests on OSS's shoulders, but I am not worried in the slightest.

Gnome is way better than KDE! It kicks butt. I've tried KDE, KDE2, and KDE2.1b, and I am not impressed with any of them. KDE is actually the best of the three. Gnome has a cleaner interface. It has better Apps and no need for tools such as Krash. It's installation is so easy! Plus, it's really free (unlike KDE, which uses software from TrollTech). It looks much, much, much cooler!!!!!!!!!!!

Installationg might be more complicated, but I think KDE works a lot better than gnome. Kmail is the best Linux mail client out there I'd say. Konqueror, is a great browser, not slow like netscape or others. No Kde component has ever crashed on me (2.0.1) and I hope it continues this way with 2.1.